Great article by Mark Ritson in which he puts the case for (as with a number of things) the position of Chief Content Officer.

Albert Einstein said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."

It is true that in the world fo Sales and Marketing that the number of leads and meetings keep reducing. (Ironically one of our clients has just complained they have too many leads and meetings. But that my friends, is a different story for a different day). So if everybody is complaining that there is not enough leads and meetings, why don't we do something about it? Like stop doing all those things that stop us getting leads and meetings!

1. Cut all advertising - Nobody looks at those ads apart from you.

2. Cut all corporate marketing - Nobody is interested (apart from you) on how great you are, everybody says it anyway.

3. Cut the cold calling - None of us take cold calls so why do you think your prospects will?

4. Cut The Events - We all do our research on-line in the safety of our pyjamas at home.

5. Empower Your Sales Team to use social, not via some Hubspot article, but get a team of proven people in to help.

6. Empower your employees to talk about and blog about you on-line. Again you need to talk to the professionals!

7. Finally, you need content. We all consume it and we all want it. Read any research when they ask your prospects what they want. They all say insight and education. Tell them something the don't know. Please, please, please, no more white papers and corporate rubbish, write something I will read. Better still get your sales people and employees to write something i will read.

And get yourself a Chief Content Officer....

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Next in the Big Seven, you need to concentrate on connecting with customers. The answer is clearly not to utilise ancient and outdated approaches like ‘advertising’ or ‘CRM’ but to move beyond these fading systems and into the world of content marketing. Rather than creating ads we should be creating content. And rather than buying media we should simply manage the content so our target customers can access it organically.
The key to getting this working is to take the advice of the Content Marketing Institute and get a chief content officer onto your board as soon as possible. Too many companies are struggling with archaic executive teams in which outdated roles like a ‘chief finance officer’ or ‘chief operations officer’ bog down a company’s strategy with pointless issues like ‘revenues’ and ‘supply chain’. Replacing a CFO with a CCO is a big step in the right direction.